


and wild for to hold, though I seem tame

by gogollescent



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e09 Trou Normand, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 16:23:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1353907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amazingly, it’s easier to make friends with people who you know will be dead in 24 hours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and wild for to hold, though I seem tame

**Author's Note:**

> Written as an episode tag for "Trou Normand" (and all revelations contained therein). I miss you, Abigail. :( Be a one-eared vampire!

Amazingly, it’s easier to make friends with people who you know will be dead in 24 hours. Abigail’s always been picky: not a loner, just, she likes her social group to reflect well on her. She develops over years the art of luring in people a little smarter, a little prettier, a little sharper and yet more genuine or generous than herself—chivalrous, is the word her mother uses, speaking of Marissa after Abigail tells a story about how Marissa pretended she’d been the one to copy Abigail’s homework. Marissa used to do a lot of that, getting away with it mostly because she looked trashier than Abigail in her belts and ragged haircuts, even though her mother was actually some breed of corporate executive and Abigail’s father worked in construction. Abigail lately has just been not doing assignments at all, not even going through the motions of cribbing off Marissa’s large handwriting, her vital-organ-dotted i’s. 

Anyway, the point is, there’s for once no call to feel around for the other girl’s specialness: the thing that gives her an edge on Abigail, despite some shallow resemblance. No mystery, really: the girl on the train isn’t setting someone up to be impaled. That's the gap. Her taste for traveling alone, her surprised and wistful smile when Abigail sits down, the smear of lipgloss like congealing blood—these are extra.  It’s kind of sad that Abigail’s going to have to stop judging people for their taste in accessories: but here she is, an accessory to murder. She has to adjust to sudden shifts in who or what she deserves.

They don’t look much alike bar hair and height. The girl, the maybe-doe, she has a handsome oval face, darker than Abigail’s: her features strongly marked and bunched in tight around the line of symmetry. Somehow it’s stranger that Abigail’s dad could look at this girl and see Abigail than it is to look at her and see a body, nearly cold.

"I was twelve the first time I went on a plane by myself," the girl is saying. "Visiting my aunt. She, uh, she lives in Texas, and she has this farm—"

It’s easy to remember the things her father’s told her; about how, on a really good day, it’ll be like the animal offers itself to you to be killed, how it will come out from the brush with its tarry eyes full of your mirror image, blah, blah, blah. Its life advertised showily by its diffusing breath, plus the carriage of its hard head, plus of course the rack. That is, the antlers, which you would think accumulate like coral, but which instead grow back every year, the size and deadliness depending on the soil. Chalk country, Abigail’s father says. That’s where the tines spread handsily, feeding on calcium in dark earth. The calcium ends up in the grass, the deer eat the grass—but the first time she heard it, she pictured the deer dead already, underground, the long legs roots for sharp-flowering bone.

The aunt apparently makes pecan bread and debates with herself and her niece over the ethics of rat traps. In truth Abigail feels nothing here of the perverse stillness that overtakes her with her hands on a rifle. She’s not in the woods: no coin-sized leaves filter her vision, and her father’s gaze is not a substitute for his fingers on her elbow. She’s smiling, laughing nervously, saying stupid things that by tomorrow will exist only in her own reluctant recollection. It’s not just the girl; lots of Nick Jonas jokes are headed for the slaughterhouse tonight. The car hums smooth and steady on the tracks. Abigail’s sense is less of motionlessness than inexorable progress—not her expression trapped in the other girl’s widening pupils, but another kind of entry, and another kind of hole.

This is what her father told her: I don’t want to kill you. They were in the cabin, and she was skinning the doe. She made a joke. “I’m not doing that bad,” she said. “Look, I didn’t pop the spleen.” And he said, I can’t let you go.

What Abigail thinks, while the girl on the train admits to feeling stifled by her parents, and dreaming sometimes of getting on a train and never getting off: she wants to go to college. She wants to live in a house other than the one she was born in. She wants, of course, to live. Her doppelganger—effigy?—hesitantly says, “This sounds so dumb. Like, everyone’s afraid of the future, I get it. But it’s nice, isn’t it, being _not there yet_?” 


End file.
